The next time you drop by your local hardware store, ask for a few extra paint stirrer sticks. With just a few of them, you can arrange your utensil drawer into segments so everything fits nicely, instead of spending money on a plastic or fitted drawer organizer that leaves half of your utensils sitting in a space too small for them.

Over at Dreaming In Color, Deneen used a handsaw to size the whole organizer and glue to stick the paint sticks together once she had arranged them the way she wanted them to rest in the drawer. You could glue them to the drawer bottom, but she noted that she didn't want the organizer to be permanent, so she measured the drawer before assembling them so they'd fit without being impossible to remove later.

The end result looks pretty good—you could also paint the sticks so you don't have a logo in your utensil drawer, but you don't have to. You also may not need to use a saw, depending on the size of your drawers. All in all, the project cost Deneen a grand total of free, since the sticks were free and she had the saw and glue at home already. Even if you have to pick up some glue, it'd still result in a cheaper, more custom utensil organizer for your kitchen drawers. What do you think? Have a way to improve the method? Let's hear it in the discussions below.